Jon Thompson tells industry conference there was ‘no evidence’ that bats were at risk from the trains
The cost of a “bat shed” to protect a species in woodland along the new HS2 high-speed line has risen to more than £100m, HS2’s chair has revealed.
The 1km-long mesh structure will be built where the London-Birmingham high-speed line emerges from a tunnel in Buckinghamshire, to protect a colony of Bechstein’s bats.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
11/07/2024 - 09:13
11/07/2024 - 09:00
Annual FrogID week aims to collect thousands of recordings of country’s 250 frog species using downloadable smartphone app
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They moan, hum, whistle and click, and can be found almost everywhere, from the neighbourhood pond to the most remote outback dunny.
From 8 to 17 November, people across the country are encouraged to participate in FrogID week, Australia’s biggest frog count. The annual event, now in its seventh year, aims to collect thousands of recordings via an app, with the data providing a snapshot of how frogs are faring across the country.
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11/07/2024 - 08:58
Warming climate has caused rivers used for transport to dry up, leaving children with little food, water or school access, says Unicef
Two years of severe drought in the Amazon rainforest have left nearly half a million children facing shortages of water and food or limited access to school, according to a UN report.
Scant rainfall and extreme heat driven by the climate crisis have caused rivers in what is usually the wettest region on Earth to retreat so much that they can no longer be traversed by boats, cutting off communities.
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11/07/2024 - 08:00
Voters have never been swayed by ‘rational debate’. Only a genuine change in the way we do politics can prevent the march of the right
We were losing slowly. Now we are losing quickly. Democracy, accountability, human rights, social justice – all were rolling backwards as money swarmed our politics. Above all, our life-support systems – the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, ice and snow – have been hammered and hammered, regardless of who is in power. Donald Trump might strike the killer blows, but he is not the cause of an ecocidal economic system. He is the embodiment of it.
Under Joe Biden, the US was missing its own climate goals, and those goals were insufficient to meet the global objective of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. That target in turn might not be tight enough to prevent a tipping of Earth systems. Already, at roughly 1.3C of heating, we see what looks alarmingly like climatic flickering: the ever wilder perturbations that tend to precede the collapse of a complex system.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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11/07/2024 - 06:00
Leading Colombian conservationists share their experiences working in the most dangerous country to fight for wildlife
Politicians, conservationists and business people from around the world met last week to discuss how to save nature at the Cop16 biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia.
For those working on the ground, however, it is the most dangerous country in the world to fight for the environment. A third of the 196 environmental defenders killed last year were Colombian. Here, four conservationists give us a glimpse into their working lives and the dangers they face.
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11/07/2024 - 00:00
Conservation groups are asking for the decision to allow Hvalur to hunt to be put on hold until after election
A coalition of conservation and animal welfare groups are urging Iceland’s president to step in and stop any plans the prime minister has to issue a whaling licence to Europe’s last whaler before the Icelandic election at the end of the month.
Earlier this year, the country granted a one-year licence to Hvalur to kill more than 100 fin whales this hunting season, despite hopes the practice may have been stopped after concerns about cruelty led to a temporary suspension in 2023.
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11/07/2024 - 00:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 07 November 2024; doi:10.1038/s44183-024-00094-2
Urbanizing river deltas are highly susceptible to sea level rise and extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. Water-related disasters are already happening more often due to climate change, rapid urbanization, unsustainable land use and aging infrastructure threatening a large fraction of human and natural environments in these low lying and sinking areas around the globe. As stress levels of climate change are accelerating, societal and physical transformations are essential for adapting our deltas to climate change. In the Netherlands, imagination and evidence by design in the form of a long-term spatial vision, played a pivotal role in the past century to set, share and accomplish a new direction to overcome flood disasters by altering the coastlines and riverbeds of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta. The unprecedented rainfall in July 2021 and the storm in December 2021 which hit Western Europe revealed the effectiveness of this new direction. We therefore plea for a prominent role of design in climate science and delta management to imagine, analyse and communicate future perspectives for climate adaptation in urbanizing deltas.
11/06/2024 - 22:22
Protest plan involves activists paddling out on kayaks and rafts to stop fossil fuel exports
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Climate protesters have vowed to stick to their plan to blockade the Port of Newcastle, despite the New South Wales police winning a legal challenge in their attempt to stop it.
“The [protest] will go ahead,” Rising Tide’s organiser, Zach Schofield, told reporters on Thursday. “We do have a right to assemble on public land and water, and we will be exercising that right, because it is critical for democracy.”
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11/06/2024 - 20:02
Balls that washed ashore and closed string of famous beaches contained scores of different materials ‘consistent with contamination from sewage’
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Thousands of mystery balls that washed up on Sydney beaches last month were gunk globules made of products such as motor oil, hair, food waste, animal matter and wastewater bacteria – but their source is yet to be traced.
A statement from the New South Wales Environment Protection Authority on Wednesday confirmed the balls comprised fatty acids, petroleum hydrocarbons and other organic and inorganic materials – and were not tar balls as previously theorised.
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11/06/2024 - 19:10
PM fully briefed on ‘potential outcomes’ of US election and says Australia is prepared for Trump’s policies on security, economic and other issues
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Australia will advocate for free trade and climate action – despite Donald Trump’s agenda against both – and persist with the Aukus alliance including nuclear submarine acquisition, the Albanese government has indicated.
Under fire from conservative media about his comments in 2017 that Trump “scares the shit” out of him, the prime minster, Anthony Albanese, was asked if he owed an apology to the president-elect.
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